When We Were Brave
by GirlMood
Summary: In a world where nations lie in ruins, where beasts hunt the survivors and ancient forests devour human souls, Soren begins a journey. He isn't saving the world; that's Ike's job. What he's doing is repaying a debt - and it's overdue. Post-Apocalyptic AU


**Title**: When We Were Brave  
**Author**: GirlMood / Passivesky  
**Genre/Fandom**: Angst, Adventure, Horror, Fantasy, Mild-Romance / Fire Emblem  
**Rating/Warnings**: M for violence, dark themes, psychological exploration, and sexual themes. No lemons, though.  
**Full Summary:** In a world where nations and cities lie in ruins, where beasts hunt the survivors and ancient forests devour human souls, Soren goes on a journey with a pistol and the clothes on his back. He isn't out to save the world, or himself. That's Ike's job. What he is doing, is repaying a debt - and it's long overdue. Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy.  
**Notes**: It's been a long time since I've attempted a multi-chapter fic. I'm a little nervous, but mostly excited. There was a lot of love put into this and just as much hate. This is the product of long sleepless nights, fruitless endeavors of the cookie-searching variety, a compulsion to write and the joy of doing so. It isn't beta-ed, although I wish I had one and _if you're willing to work with me, please let me know_; and, despite the length of the prologue, it's going to be a mini-epic about 15-17 chapters. Concrit would be much loved and, as always, I will respond to each and every review I receive. Thanks in advance to whoever decides to follow me in this brave, not-so-little endeavor.

**When We Were Brave**

**Prologue  
**

* * *

Sometime in June, Soren wastes his last bullet on half a man. The living half, that is - the half that the beasts haven't devoured yet, which is strange and makes Soren watch the trees with quick, flitting glances because a beast never wastes any part of its meal: bones and skin and flesh, even the teeth are crushed to powder and swallowed. A tiny part of Soren hopes that maybe the beast was small, too small to drag away a grown man; maybe it had to take half a man at a time, maybe it's still dragging away the legs, stumbling over locked knees and shredded bowels - but he knows better.

There is no such thing as a small beast. _There is no such thing._

* * *

The man is still alive.

He is conscious despite it all: half a man, clinging to shreds of pine bark and rock; frothing foam and black blood at the mouth, vomiting body acids and what's left of his insides onto the dirty snow; dragging himself along on his elbows and hands, clawing at the permafrost with frozen fingers, black with rot. A glancing blow from a claw (glancing, Soren knows, because catching one full in the face would have spliced it open) has cut out one of his eyes; it oozes flesh, while the other eye weeps and tries to stare at Soren, pupil blown and skittering, unfocused.

There is just enough life in him, just enough of his spinal column left to receive firing neurons and operate his mouth and speak, to beg Soren to please, _please just shoot him_.

Soren does, and watches the head cave in, globs of mass splatter-falling. A finger twitches, a shoulder spasms in an aborted brain command; the man dies with a violent full (-half) body tremor, completely this time, and Soren can't keep his eyes away.

He sits down heavily in the thin snow, cracks his knees against the ice beneath, and stares, first, at the body - then at the trees. He should run, he knows - there's been blood split, meat carved for the taking - but he's very, very tired. In his lap, his fingers go through the motions of reloading the pistol - but the chamber is empty, and he has nothing to reload. Just empty motions. Something to do.

The trees loom over him, tall, vicious spectators, casting long shadows across the ground as the sun sets. The forest is not a man's friend; it houses monsters but withholds shelter from humans. It speaks in a magic language, an evil tongue of sensation in the heart and foreboding in the mind. It sends nightmares in the dark; it promises death, retribution for a wrongdoing that no one remembers - and it whispers to him now savagely, an intangible body of sentience and intellect that simultaneously recognizes him as an enemy and as one of the beasts that prowl.

_Fear, _snarls the forest to the enemy self, maliciously as it scrabbles for footholds in his soul, seeking to poison and ingest the intruder. _Fear. Fear. Fear._

_Welcome, _rejoices the forest to his other, secret half. _Welcome. Welcome. Welcome._

"Hello," Soren says, and magic flares through his bones.

* * *

A heavy hand lands on his shoulder; he jerks, starts and shudders, whips the pistol muzzle over his shoulder.

"Easy there," chastens Ike, even as he grabs Soren's arm and twists it around offhandedly, even as Soren recognizes him and dreads.

Ike isn't supposed to be here. He's supposed to be a mile back, scouting the barren, frozen valley for hostiles or something to scrounge, the former of which is more likely than the latter. Clearly, Ike has chosen to follow him instead, and he's more afraid of this than the fact that the forest is suddenly silent, that no more _fear_/_welcome _poison is being bled into his heart.

"Wonder what got the rest of him," Ike releases his arm and moves past him. _Too easily_, Soren thinks and is nervous because Ike should at least respect the gun; but Ike is a big man with large shoulders and hands, wrapped in tattered, rancid rags, filthy and course-haired, and if he has the capacity to fear or give way to, Soren has never seen it.

Ike kneels by the body and calmly examines where the torso has been ripped away from the rest: an abdomen, shoulders, one arm, a head and neck. The scattered intestines are steaming a little distance away. Ike picks up a severed finger and turns it over curiously. ",Or why it didn't eat the rest of him."

The smell is disgusting; Soren focuses on his boots, on the plastic tarpaulin and duck tape Ike's strung around them to keep them from falling apart. "We should go. It could come back."

And he doesn't have any bullets left. But Ike doesn't know that – and he won't tell him, because what Ike doesn't know might keep Soren alive for a little while longer.

"Okay." Blue eyes turn to him - unnerving because Soren can't ever read Ike's gaze – slide to the gun in his (barely) trembling hand. "You gonna put that away?"

He does, manages to sneer obnoxiously as he does to cover up his discomfort; but Ike's eyes seem as sly as Soren can judge and it makes him shake. Makes him watch carefully the broad shoulders he follows, the hands that he's seen break a man's neck, makes him worry that Ike has been counting shots.

* * *

"You're afraid of me," Ike says casually as they huddle together in a side ditch, naked beneath piles of stinking rags and garbage, chasing away the night's freeze in one another's arms.

Something howls in the dark, and Soren closes his eyes, counts the seconds until something else screams afterwards. (Nothing is shifting in the back of his human self; nothing is stirring in its bindings, or raising its head and looking with sleepless eyes upon the world.)

"Yes," Soren admits matter-of-factly, looks Ike right in his blue eyes (the left is a little cloudy, is developing cataracts from iodine deficiency), and says without saying that that isn't going to deter him.

From what, is something that neither address.

Ike shifts; his body is hot with fever and the arm he has slung over Soren's bony hips is burning. It helps Soren keep warm, but it is worrying – he still needs Ike and an incapacitated Ike is not a useful Ike.

"That's okay," A warm chin tucks itself over his head while the other hand and its large, thick-boned fingers explore his sides, moving up and down between the dips between of his ribs, the jagged serpentine slopes of raised scars and pockmarks of buckshot spread.

Soren presses his thighs together, feels the gun in between them press back.

"Stop it."

The hands still. Ike laughs quietly; and Soren turns his head, can feel Ike's Adam's apple jumping against his face.

"Of course, princess. Whatever you wish, princess."

"Shut up."

Ike laughs again.

"Don't you want me to save you? Keep you safe from the big, scary world?" There's a definite tone of bitter humor; Soren thinks it is directed toward his unwanted self. It gives Ike pleasure, Soren thinks, to court and mock a bound monster like a child who makes faces at dangerous animals from the safety of a concrete wall and an insurmountable pit.

_It is only safe so long as one does not fall into the pit with the animal._

"You're not saving me," he bites back. "I'm using you."

"Should you be telling me that?" Amused now. A little indulgent. Soren hopes he's right in thinking that he can read some of Ike's moods by now.

"You don't care."

Ike moves to catch Soren's eye, leans in when he avoids it, presses both hands on the dirt wall behind him on either side of his head. He leans in so close that his oily hair irritates Soren's cheeks, so close that Soren has to breathe the same hot, sick-smelling air that Ike breathes out.

"And why would you think that?"

Soren's eyes are hard. _Steel_, he thinks. _Like steel_. "Because you're the kind of person who needs a cause. Because I'm the only one who can give it to you."

Ike's smile doesn't falter. A hand rises to touch Soren's forehead, to trace the grime over the Brand's curlicues – an act of sacrilege to a sacrilege – and Soren is frozen, because _no one should want to touch it_.

"I think I want more than that."

"No," he breathes out, and he's definitely shaking this time. Ike's forehead presses to his, eyes bright with disease and triumph; he's won something, but Soren doesn't know what.

"You should sleep," this said even as Ike's mouth moves to slant over his.

"Yeah. I…I should. I should. I - _OH_," A groan, and Soren's hands are claws that tear Ike's wounds open, breaking scabs and dragging blood down his sides. "Stop. Stop. _Stop it_."

He does, pulls away from Soren. Although Ike is usually difficult to read, the self-satisfaction is clear on his face, and it makes Soren want to hit him. Take a rock and beat his teeth out.

"Okay. Okay. Sleep, then."

And Soren does, forces himself to, sleeps fitfully in the arms of an enemy playing at ally.

* * *

He wakes before dawn, when Ike takes it upon himself to play xylophone with his spine, counting out notes across the hard vertebrae.

"Stop that." He slaps Ike's hands away, but Ike catches him by the wrists, squeezes. He looks at Soren sharply.

"What did you dream about?"

_A beast rising from the sludge of a savage garbage land. Two heads: a heron that wept poisonous tears and a black-faced lion who called to him in the Ancient Tongue, that lost language of aristocrats and liars._

"Nothing." he says.

Ike's eyes harden. "You called for someone."

"I called for no one."

"_Liar_."

Ike moves like a beast, too fast to track in the early morning dark, and grabs him by the throat, shoves him into the dirt; the empty pistol is lost somewhere in the ditch refuge and, though Soren struggles, he can't break free. Colors flash across his eyes, white stars bloom like short lived flowers in his vision; he tries to gasp, gurgles, weeps as blood vessels break in the soft skin of his neck. A fist is digging into his side, _twisting_ - and he screams as a rib cracks; something snarls in the back of his soul, hates and rages against the silverly mind-chains that restrain it, pushes and thrashes and _finds an opening_ and suddenly, his hands are claws that cut up Ike's face and try to rip out his eyes.

Ike is laughing - hate in his eyes, gleaming bright as he strangles and his cheeks are scored by half-formed claws.

"There you are," he says. "There you are!"

Soren sees red lines and tones of pink, fluctuating shapes and indistinct edges; the last white star blooms dead center in his sight, flares, and then he doesn't know anymore.

* * *

**To Be Continued.**


End file.
